


The Bridge

by ElvaDeath



Series: The World of Asano Gakushuu [6]
Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Angst, Asano Gakuhou's Bad Parenting, Asano Gakushuu is Bad at Feelings, Asano Gakushuu-centric, Character Study, Depressed Asano Gakushuu, Drowning, Help, I'm drowning in the angst, I'm so sorry I swear I'll make a happy one soon, Sakakibara Ren is a Good Friend, Suicide, there's so much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:28:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27724844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElvaDeath/pseuds/ElvaDeath
Summary: There’s always one place in your life that you never truly leave.He found out about Ikeda first from his mother, second from old photos, and third from visiting the bridge.- E.D.
Series: The World of Asano Gakushuu [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1657669
Comments: 12
Kudos: 84
Collections: Asano Gakushuu Centric





	The Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, I have so many random half-completed fics... Especially angsty stuff. So, here's another I found and finished off. It's not the best I've ever done, but here it is.
> 
> Enjoy!  
> \- E.D.

There’s always one place in your life that you never truly leave.

Even though he’s only been there once, his life has been dictated by that place from the moment he was five and his father changed for good. He isn’t sure he can remember the before, when his father baked burnt cookies with him and carried him around the house on his shoulders, smiling and proud of the fact that Gakushuu existed. The only reason he knows what his father was like is because of the stories his mother used to tell him. For other children, their fairy tales were full of magical creatures and wondrous lands. For Gakushuu, his were of a world long lost where his father loved him.

He found out about Ikeda first from his mother, second from old photos, and third from visiting the bridge.

When his mother had a full head of hair and breathed, she told him about The Boy that father loved. She told him about the times Ikeda came to their house, played with Gakushuu, and chattered excitedly to his father. He’d scoffed at them, bitter disbelief at hearing that his father laughed without someone being in pain. When she left, he wished he’d listened closer, for both her sake and for memories that no one else can give him. 

He forgot them, in his pain and grief. The stories she told him were overshadowed by his father’s cold glares at finding him crying in her garden, by his silence that spoke greater volumes than his harsh words. His mother would have wanted him to talk to his father, so they can work through their grief together, but she had a habit of seeing a heart of gold in both of them that didn’t exist. Without her there to fill the gap, the void between them only grew until his father was ‘the principal’ and he was ‘Asano’.

Last year of Junior High, and that void fractured so far he couldn’t look the man in the eye. If he hadn’t made friends out of minions as a result of that year, he would have happily erased the entire thing. Especially the part where his last name was dragged through the mud, and he almost broke his skull open in a fight defending himself. The other people came out a lot worse than him, but that’s besides the point.

Amid all the chaos, he rediscovered The Boy who’d stolen his father from him. It had been the time where his cheek was covered by a bandage, and the principle had almost destroyed the classroom on top of the hill. Gakushuu hadn’t been looking, exactly, but he’d found that box of photos open on the principal's home desk and he just had to look.

Him, on his father’s shoulders. The Boy reaching up to tickle him. The Boy holding that basketball sitting in the corner of the study. The Boy grinning as he held up a medal. The Boy chasing Gakushuu on their lawn. The Boy talking with his mother. The Boy with two others, standing in front of the classroom on the hill. A name to fit to the face that took his father’s heart and left him with the principal.

Rikuto Ikeda.

He’d left the box as he’d found it, researched his name, and finally found where his father had gone.

Maybe he shouldn’t have visited the bridge. While the class from the hilltop found their foothold to their future in a book, he was slowly being stripped of his. Only a few hours ago, his future had been bursting with potential. He would go to the best university, be accepted straight into a top-tier job upon graduation, easily skip his way through promotions, and become a world leader in whatever he tried his hand at. Watching the media descend like a swarm of wasps on his house, he realised that everything he’d been building since he was five was gone.

So he should have recognised the fact that it wasn’t the best time to visit the bridge. He went anyway.

It was a dark night, that one. Plenty of stars overhead. It hadn’t been dark when he got there, it had slowly crept up on him and before he knew it he could barely see the lapping water below him.

It’s funny how such an innocent little place could have taken a life, his father, and his childhood along with it. The bridge is not wide, not long, not pretty, not ugly. Completely ordinary. And yet…

There was the place where The Boy’s shoes had been placed, carefully, side by side with a little note.

There was the place that The Boy had stood, looking down into the water, teetering on the edge.

There was the place The Boy had fallen, straight into the water, and sunk. Where he’d closed his eyes for the last time and breathed his final breath.

Gakushuu isn’t suicidal, he really isn’t, he just doesn’t understand how Ikeda, this boy who was more of a son to the principal than Gakushuu ever was, could have let himself fall. At midnight, when the alarm on his phone goes off, Gakushuu startles from his reverie.

He’s not sure what he’s thinking when he takes his shoes off. Not entirely certain why he places them side by side, polished to perfection. If he were to take the time to truly examine his headspace, like his therapist advises, he would say that he does it to understand what Ikeda has gone through in his last moments.

What better way to understand a person than putting yourself in their shoes on their moment of death?

The metal is cold under his feet, colder in his hand where he grips the post. It’s… exhilarating, he thinks. A rush of life in a sea of death. If, hypothetically, he were to let go, Gakushuu doesn’t suppose he’d mind it much. Cold water in his lungs, a small bit of pain and burning, and then eternal peace.

If not peace, then just the end of it all.

He sways forward, staring down with hazy eyes at the glossy surface of the water below. He can see the little ripples and waves, the darkness from the depth, the exact place he would land if he were to, hypothetically, let himself topple over.

What’s a sprinkle of death in the grand scheme of things?

He isn’t suicidal. No, Gakushuu has never been one to think too much, to acknowledge that he might not be all ok, so how could he have ever thought enough to decide to die?

He’s not suicidal, but he’s tired and maybe a little drunk and the night is cold, so cold, that a thin layer of frost had formed on the metal. He’s tired, has been for a while, the evidence clear in the purple below his eyes. He doesn’t think, doesn’t consider it, he’s just tired and drunk and cold and caught up in ‘what if’ that he doesn’t notice

when

his

fingers

slip.

He isn’t (sorry, wasn’t) suicidal, but the grasp of death pulling him under doesn’t care.

It’s more than a little pain. See, he fights it, right until the last breath. Maybe he shouldn’t have come out on a night so cold, or stayed for so long, or forgot that no one comes down here on a Monday night. He fights it, and that makes it a little worse, because he doesn’t want it. He’s a logical child, he knows that no one is coming to save him. He fights anyway.

He’s never been good at winning the most important battles.

He wakes, on the break of dawn, to find his body below him and The Boy sitting beside him, head down. Of course he panics, but there’s nothing he can do, and he knows that. He can only watch as some poor woman spots his body, and the police arrive, and then, finally, his body is taken out.

He doesn’t look. He knows the effect of water on corpses.

Ikeda looks for him. They don’t talk (maybe Ikeda has forgotten how to) but Gakushuu doesn’t think he wants to talk anyway. He wanted to know Ikeda so badly, wanted to scream and rage at him that he was the one who took his father away from him, but…

How can he do that now, when he’s done exactly the same thing?

Oh god, he didn’t even leave a note.

He tries to follow the people who take his body away. The second he steps off the bridge, he finds himself right back in the water underneath. So, there he has to wait as the long haul of police and journalists and curious locals hover and hover and eventually pull away. The day turns to night.

“I’m sorry.”

Ikeda doesn’t sound like Gakushuu thought he would. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but that wasn’t it.

“It’s a bit late for that.” He sighs, kicking his legs over the water. He gets no response, so shrugs and pushes himself off again, plunging into the freezing water.

It doesn’t matter. He can’t die. He’s already dead.

He watches the long troop of friends and admirers wander to the bridge. Ren gives a heartfelt soliloquy, then breaks down in the middle. Gakushuu wishes he could be there to tell him it was the best he’s ever written. He’s sorry he doesn’t hear the rest of it, but he hopes Ren will finish it one day.

Ikeda starts speaking. Each time Gakushuu shuts him down. He doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to yet acknowledge what he is or where they are. Then, he gets bored (he was always good at that) and starts responding, carrying on conversations. He learns things he wishes he never did, like how his father loved watching him and Ikeda play basketball, declaring that one day Gakushuu would be a star player just like Ikeda.

It makes it so much worse, having all these stories in his head, when the principal visits the bridge for the first time since Gakushuu’s death.

He doesn’t say anything. Gakushuu doesn’t know if it would be worse or better if he did. They just stare at each other, the principal staring right through him when Gakushuu can see him perfectly. If Gakushuu were alive, the principal would have given him a hard stare for that look, which Gakushuu would have returned gladly, and they would have had a silent staring contest until Gakushuu inevitably lost and the principal gloated. Gakushuu wishes he could hear the principal gloat to him one last time, instead of this empty sad silence carving harsh pain into his face.

Gakushuu was right, in the end. His life has been tied to this bridge since Ikeda decided to fall, and now he will be tied to it forever in death. If he is lucky, someone will remember to visit him always, but time fades away all memory and death comes for all. His fate is to be alone, trapped with another version of himself, eternally wishing he had just never come to the bridge that particular night.

But some could say that he was saved. The world is cruel to the flightless birds who continue to jump, regardless of their lack of wings. Here, tucked away in their own pocket of the world, he is safe. No one can ever harm him again. The bridge will gather the two of them in its cold embrace, and will never, ever, let them go.

There’s always one place in your life that you never truly leave.

**Author's Note:**

> Question time!
> 
> Would you like me to create a post just listing headcanons I've made for my work? (MEME night, Ren's mother being a television presenter, etc) I'm going to be putting it all together for myself so I remember them, but if you'd like to see them laid out, please tell me!


End file.
